Grand Tamasha

If you’ve spent any time reading books, watching movies about—or traveling to—India—chances are you’ve come across the depiction of an urban slum somewhere along the way. In most of these popular portrayals, slums are dens of inequity and deprivation. Citizens appear to be trapped in a vortex of poverty, bad governance, and corruption. In these stories, politicians and their henchmen appear to have the last laugh, extracting whatever they can from citizens who have few exit options.A new book by the political scientists Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, Migrants and Machine Politics, informs us that much of what we think we know is based on myth, not fact.Adam and Tariq join Milan on the podcast this week to discuss a decade’s worth of research in the slums of Bhopal and Jaipur. The trio discuss what slums look like from the bottom-up rather than the top-down, the realities of machine politics in India, and the surprising agency that poor citizens possess. Plus, they discuss how two trends—centralization and H